Around a Small Mountain

Synopsis

Vittorio stops to help Kate when her car breaks down on a mountain road. When they meet again, Vittorio discovers that Kate has rejoined a circus after a long time away. He begins to learn about the troupe's buried past and Kate's connection to it, while experiencing the magic of the circus.

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Rivette somehow made an entire career out of never being obtuse or obnoxious - I'm again reminded of Serge Daney's saying on the director, that he was never trying to sell you anything. Rivette's movies feel like "art" films in the most genuine sense of the term, and that's no different here - but in a way, none of Rivette's films is as fully teeming with that same humility as this one. It's arguably the warmest movie Rivette ever made, and in a way feels like an antidote to the harsh romantic fatalism of Don't Touch The Axe. Around a Small Mountain is light as a feather but cuts deep, as beautiful as can be and aching inside.

Rivette, like Tati before him, ends his feature career in the circus. But where Tati's swan song is his own homecoming, Rivette's takes the position of someone watching the prodigal child's return. It's a small but significant change of perspective that befits Rivette, who more than any of his other Cahiers cohorts captured the feeling of a critic becoming an artist, of using the spectator's vantage point as an active participant. Around a Small Mountain goes so far as to insert a Rivette avatar in the form of Vittorio, an Italian wanderer who gets caught up with the traveling circus and appears to be the only person on Earth, including the actual troupe, to care about it.

A circus for a world who doesn't love it anymore, a man who died for entertainment and the scars and fissures he left behind. Sometimes the moon shines and sometimes it does not. Among Rivette's warmest.

The final film from arch gamesman Jacques Rivette is a captivating variation on one of the themes that most obsessed him: the ineffable interplay between life and performance. Luminously photographed by Irina Lubtchansky in the open-air splendor of the south of France, it revolves around an Italian flaneur (Sergio Castellitto) who finds himself drawn into the world of a humble traveling circus led by the elusive Kate (Jane Birkin), whose enigmatic past becomes a tantalizing mystery he is determined to solve. In a career studded with sprawling shaggy dog epics, Rivette’s swan song is a deceptively slight grace note that contains multitudes.

Jacques Rivette’s final film before his death in 2016 is, by far, his shortest at a mere 84 minutes. It’s also the least of all his films. Even if it’s a minor work, this is still an effervescent and frequently enchanting film that fits squarely into his filmography. Instead of returning to his frequent setting of the theater, Rivette makes the circus his final stage. Kate (Jane Birkin, in her third collaboration with Rivette) returns to the circus her father founded after being banished from it 15 years ago following a tragic incident. Vittorio (Sergio Castellitto, returning for his second Rivette film) meets Kate when he stops to silently fix her broken down car. Vittorio decides to follow Kate, and…

A circus for a world who doesn't love it anymore, a man who died for entertainment and the scars and fissures he left behind. Sometimes the moon shines and sometimes it does not. Among Rivette's warmest.

Rivette somehow made an entire career out of never being obtuse or obnoxious - I'm again reminded of Serge Daney's saying on the director, that he was never trying to sell you anything. Rivette's movies feel like "art" films in the most genuine sense of the term, and that's no different here - but in a way, none of Rivette's films is as fully teeming with that same humility as this one. It's arguably the warmest movie Rivette ever made, and in a way feels like an antidote to the harsh romantic fatalism of Don't Touch The Axe. Around a Small Mountain is light as a feather but cuts deep, as beautiful as can be and aching inside.

Perhaps the only Rivette film that takes place in the real world as (well as) we know it. Ostensibly lovely and pure, perhaps hiding something, even if it’s only a slight thing. All anticipated toying with and elliptical tampering with the mise en scene, with what is internally, externally possible has diffused by this point, to the point of being the passé matter of sideshows in the face of the main attraction of life: regrets and missed opportunities, building everyday, weighing the spirit down. Rivette, ever the prestidigitator, never the ironic, concludes on as amusingly ambiguous a note as he always has, complicating the text of the film and his filmography alike*, of his view on what it…

For Jacques Rivette’s last film, he makes a movie without a conspiracy theory and without paranoia so that he could make a movie about people. Here, his usual storytelling style, through long scenes of performance and leisurely dialogue, serves as a conduit to a decidedly human story about a traveling circus and the wealthy Italian drifter who becomes inordinately interested in their circus routines. By Rivette’s standards, it’s stripped down, running a mere 84 minutes, but still not unambitious - it strikes me as a very conscious attempt at streamlining some of the main ideas of his career into a sweet, serene love story. The scenes are still lengthy, but rather than creating a sense of unease, they just create…

The final film from arch gamesman Jacques Rivette is a captivating variation on one of the themes that most obsessed him: the ineffable interplay between life and performance. Luminously photographed by Irina Lubtchansky in the open-air splendor of the south of France, it revolves around an Italian flaneur (Sergio Castellitto) who finds himself drawn into the world of a humble traveling circus led by the elusive Kate (Jane Birkin), whose enigmatic past becomes a tantalizing mystery he is determined to solve. In a career studded with sprawling shaggy dog epics, Rivette’s swan song is a deceptively slight grace note that contains multitudes.

Jacques Rivette’s final film before his death in 2016 is, by far, his shortest at a mere 84 minutes. It’s also the least of all his films. Even if it’s a minor work, this is still an effervescent and frequently enchanting film that fits squarely into his filmography. Instead of returning to his frequent setting of the theater, Rivette makes the circus his final stage. Kate (Jane Birkin, in her third collaboration with Rivette) returns to the circus her father founded after being banished from it 15 years ago following a tragic incident. Vittorio (Sergio Castellitto, returning for his second Rivette film) meets Kate when he stops to silently fix her broken down car. Vittorio decides to follow Kate, and…